Getting Past Size-Zero Envy

I have recently been getting letters from young women in their teens and 20s asking me how they can look like the new wave of Hollywood stars who have suddenly lost huge amounts of weight and are shockingly thin. The girls I'm hearing from tell me that they were feeling okay about their bodies before the recent spate of skinny stars. But the rail-thin arms and gaunt faces of celebrities have reminded them that skinny is best, and please, they beg, can I help them look that way?

[sidebar]To be honest, it's taken me 25 years of healing my own obsession with food to be able to look at pictures of waiflike famous people and feel compassion for them instead of envy. I, too, once thought that if only I could have that body, that hair, that life, I would be happy. I, too, believed that billions of years of evolution had come down to the survival of the thinnest.

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Prevention Newsletters

After working with thousands of people over the years and receiving tens of thousands of letters about how they suffer with their body size and food, I know that this is one problem that you can't solve alone. The pressure and the imperative to be as thin as possible are too great. It's tough to fight the culture on your own; after all, you're vastly outnumbered. Unless we have directly challenged its hold on us, most of us believe deep down that our lives would be better and our suffering would be gone if we were thin. [pagebreak]

A Lonely Struggle

Unfortunately, in our culture, the standard of beauty is thinness to the point of anorexia, and the answer to life's problems is always in something you don't have, don't know, or need to buy. Quiet self-reflection, being kind to yourself, and doing what's best for you—even if it doesn't meet cultural measures of beauty or success—are foreign concepts. To discuss them is like speaking Croatian in Chinatown—unless you find others with the same need to reflect and take care of themselves, too.

We all have beliefs that run and can ruin our lives, and we need help to discover them. To counteract the psychological effect of hundreds of media images of laughing, beautifully dressed, ghostly thin stars, we need the support of other people who are also struggling with size-zero envy. They can help us find out what is true for us and what would best serve our health, our well-being, our happiness, and our lives. And we can help them on their voyage of discovery.

When a tree is tender and young, first making its roots, a gardener knows to protect it from deer, fertilize it with nutrients, water it; in short, pay loving attention as it gets started. The gardener doesn't grow the tree; she provides the conditions in which it can thrive. We need to do the same with our souls, hearts, spirits, and bodies. We need to provide the conditions in which we can thrive. And one of our "growing requirements" is other people who can see us, hear us, and love us for who we are and want to become.

Of course, that's not what we do. We're so used to battering ourselves around, to toughing it out, and to taking care of everyone else and not looking after ourselves. We're used to throwing the seeds of our lives in soil and not paying them one more minute of attention. We attack and punish ourselves. Unlike plants, we don't trust our fundamental desire to move toward the light, especially when it comes to food, dieting, and weight. The personal and cultural pull is to believe that everything would be all right if we could just eat cabbage soup or grapefruit for 2 weeks.[pagebreak]

Come Together

In every class I teach, we form support groups that meet weekly for 2 to 3 hours. But you don't have to attend one of my classes to be in a support group, nor do you need to be in a support group to ask for help. Groups are simply convenient, structured, prearranged gatherings in which support is available.

You can find people of like mind and heart now, where you live. They don't need to be your best friends. Think about what you require. What are the parts of you that need loving attention, nurturing, and protection? Think about how you can attend to those needs. Does a group sound appealing to you? If so, take out a classified ad in your local paper. That's how I got started. Years ago, I placed an ad saying that I wanted to start a group for women who wished to deal with their difficulties with food without dieting. Ten women called. We decided on a day of the week, a time, and a place, and I started developing exercises we could do together. Since then, I've written Why Weight?, a book of exercises especially designed for leaderless support groups.

If you aren't a group person, you can find other ways to receive support so that you don't sink back into familiar, unkind patterns. Perhaps you can meet weekly with someone at your church or temple, or find a counselor, therapist, or spiritual advisor. In all likelihood, you have a friend or neighbor who needs this kind of support as much as you do: Be a group of two that meets a few times a week over coffee or a walk. Some search engines, such as Yahoo, offer a place to form an invitation-only online discussion group. Or you could do it through a public blog at a place like Blogger, where others may access it through a search engine.

However you do it, find people who can support and accept your whole being: everything you want to become, your heart's desires, the fundamental things you value most about being alive—all the things we mistakenly think we'll get once we're thin.

My experience is that once you start looking for support, you begin to find it. And then the most wonderful thing happens: Once you feel accepted for who you are and who you want to be, you stop wanting someone else's life or body and start inhabiting your own.